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New Years Resolutions 2016

End of the week and beginning of a new year. Things have been very busy for me this year, but I’ve ended up learning a lot about what I’m trying to do. Not bad, considering I am constantly trying to figure out what I’m doing. Thus far my accomplishments are mostly personal, but I feel like they were all major steps toward this writing dream I’ve given myself: Got this website up, finished editing my book (mostly), found a cover artist, and started making plans for a modest book launch.

It’s tempting to rest on my laurels while I wait for my first book to be ready to publish, however I want to keep the momentum going. To that end, I’m going to lay out some resolutions for 2016.

I will launch In Honor’s Shadow before March.
While the book is about 90% ready to go, with me mostly waiting on getting a few things back, I need to make sure to not let this rest until the last moment of my deadline. There’s this whole checklist of things I need to check and double-check. Ideally I’ll have everything ready to go before the end of January, but I want to give myself a bit of wiggle room. Mostly I want to have things ready to the point where I just throw a switch and everything is set into motion. I also plan to take notes so my next launch will be easier.

I will keep my website updated.
This one is a bigger point than I think a lot of people will understand. Right now I’ve updated once a week, and while I want to eventually draw that back I’ve always felt it is important to keep up a living presence on the web. For now there isn’t much here besides my blog posts, which makes it critical that I keep them coming. Eventually, once I have more varied content, I can back of on this. There are plans, I just tend to think they are ones for the distant future.

I will finish writing my next book.
Probably my most ambitious goal, and the one I will push at the cost of others (except #1). I’m not really sure how long it will be, besides saying I expect it will be up to 30% longer. I would LIKE to have the book done by August or September so I can really dig into editing before the year is out (it would be great if I could release a full-sized novel every year) so that is my real goal, but I don’t want to overreach either.

I will be ready for NaNoWriMo.
Events contrived to make me unable to participate this year. That is still possible for next year too, honestly. I have a lot of elderly family members that aren’t in the best health, and they obviously take priority. None of that is under my control. My ability to be ready for NaNoWriMo in the event that things DO work out is, however. Currently I’ve got 3 ideas that would all be a good novella, so there is no reason I shouldn’t have those ready to go come November.

I will write at least 1K words/day, 6 days a week.
Even if I’m writing slowly this is just 2 hours of work. I expect to be writing more than simply 2 hours a day, so there is absolutely no reason I cannot make this goal unless I’m letting myself slack off. At a pace of 1K/day I should have my new novel ready in draft form after just 4 or 5 months of writing even if I end up having to rewrite vast swaths of the story. Moreover, I want this to hold true even if I’m in an editing cycle, so things like blog posts and the like also count.

There you go, the five goals I’m setting for myself this year. Next year I can revisit these (if I remember) and measure how well I did. And perhaps if I enjoyed the exercise I’ll set up some new goals to go into 2017 with.